PILATE

Very little is known for certain about Pontius Pilate, the man who crucified Christ, but this has not stopped writers in every age from imagining his life. In this extraordinary book, Ann Wroe recounts the lives of all our Pilates, among them the glittering medieval tyrant devoted to gambling; the early-Christian intellectual; the beleaguered Victorian administrator; the Coptic saint, martyred on the cross; the Alpine devil, in league with Satan to claim the souls of mountain climbers; and the wriggling modern pragmatist, whose dilemma over Jesus has been described by Tony Blair as "a timeless parable of political life."

This is also the story, as far as it can be reconstructed from archaeology and from classical sources, of the real Pilate: his likely background, his career, his duties, his failings, his fears, and the attitude he might have had to the various forms of thinking he encountered in Judea. Ann Wroe shows how, in his struggles with fate and free will, Pilate's story has also become the story of ourselves.